Imagine you are nine and the Clementi Sonatina in C is the 18th century equivalent of a computer game, filled with booby traps and assorted threats in the form of menacing black keys, terrifying dissonances--all kinds of unprepared disturbances.

Or have you grown so accustomed to hearing the piece in its mangle-ironed state that there is no room in it for fantasy play?

Today's nine-year-old thought it was a riot to approach it this way. We both decided that even though one risked making mistakes (which you do anyway) it was a whole lot more fun.

Those of us who have lived with the piano all our lives are more than a bit spoiled by it. Just as anyone under 20 has a hard time imagining life without computers anyone born after, say, 1800, would find it difficult to imagine life without pianos.

It is perhaps impossible to imagine just what the impact must have been of all that resonance all of a sudden emanating from a keyboard instrument. People who describe the sound of the forte piano as thin are comparing it with the modern piano. The closest anyone might have come who was alive in 1727 would have been the sound of the baryton or of the viola d'amore--stringed instruments with unfingered strings in constant sympathetic vibration.

Haydn was certainly writing for an instrument he heard as fully fleshed out because, to the ear of the 18th century, the forte piano was richly resonant.

Yesterday one of my teenage students wanted to work on a piece on which she was "stuck." (I wondered whether at her age I would have volunteered an admission that I needed help in quite that way.)

Since she has worked on balancing the cantabile melody with the repeated chordal accompaniment, thinking about the technique is no longer necessary or interesting. I suggested she imagine words to go with each phrase and play so that I could hear her inflections. To our mutual enjoyment, she did so right off.

That her result did not match anything I might have imagined did not matter. Most likely she will change her mind about it over and over again. Whatever happens, the music is now where she wants it to be, in motion.

I just returned from a few days listening to Music Theorists present papers on all sorts of aspects of the experience of music, some mathematical, some philosophical, and many in between. The best part was being exposed to music I had never heard before: I can't wait to get acquainted with Ligeti's Piano Etudes.

Rhythm and tone are two completely separate dimensions of music and represent two entirely different areas of physical and mental activity. Many people have trouble reconciling them, as I did for many years. Rhythm is usually the first one to be emphasized in pedagogy and it quickly becomes tyrannical, blocking out whatever chance tone might have had to exercise equivalent power.

I learn about this mostly from the music of Ludwig van Beethoven.

In a couple of days I will be leaving to attend a conference of Music Theorists. I was puzzled by Music Theory when I was young and still am. It seemed to me that theorists were telling us how we should hear music but that seemed the wrong way around. We hear music the way we hear it: it is composers who instruct us about our potential to hear more and more and more.

It would be fair to say that all of my teaching is based on this premise.

Last night my singing group, once again, affirmed the validity of this premise. The group included two people who had never been in such a group before and who have zero confidence as readers. The song was a spiritual, Now Let Me Fly. Without coaching, without input of any kind, they found, just by using their ears, the most meaningful part of the song and expressed it so beautifully that I almost cried.

They taught me the song. That's why I have always enjoyed working with the unschooled, the unspoiled: children and amateurs.

Today brought one of those moments of deep satisfaction from teaching: My two young adult students (16 and 21) are learning Brahms, not quite their first experience of his music, but close enough. Listening to them respond to the sounds is like being privy to a remarkable natural occurrence, like the beautiful sunsets over the Hudson this past week. They get it in all its intelligent sensuality, not as a result of any analysis but simply from the sounds themselves.